Assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullah. The twelfth of Rabi al-Awwal is upon us, and with it the argument that comes around every year. I am putting something here in place of that argument. Some years ago my teacher, Mawlana Muhammad Taha Karaan (Allah have mercy on him), spoke on the Mawlid at a meeting of scholars at the Muslim Judicial Council. He was addressing ulama, and he spoke the way scholars speak to one another: half the sentences in Arabic, books named without explanation, the argument moving at the speed of a room that already knows the material. Anyone listening from outside that room would catch the tone and miss the substance. I have taken that recording and made it readable. I arranged the fragments into prose, gave the English for every Arabic term he used, identified each scholar and book he named in shorthand, and added footnotes where a reader would need one. The main text is his — his reasoning, his order, his conclusion. The footnotes are mine, and so is any error in them. What he does with the question is not what you expect. He could not find a single Shafi’i jurist who condemns the Mawlid itself, and he shows you why: the author of the school’s standard book against innovation is the same man who calls the Prophetic Mawlid among the finest things introduced in his time. He shows you that the earliest Mawlids were works of Prophetic biography — six and seven volumes of hadith and history — and that one of the largest of them was written by the scholar who wrote in defence of Ibn Taymiyya. Then he turns and cuts the other way. The standing at the mention of the birth, he says, is a separate legal question, and on it he sides with Ibn Hajar al-Haytami, who called it a grave and objectionable innovation. He says this plainly, in a room where many would have preferred otherwise. And he says that once a good thing hardens into a ritual, and the ritual into an obligation — you did not stand, therefore you do not love him — the very jurist who permitted it would be the first to object.

Assalamu alaikum. That was my intention (niyya). Not the Quran. Not the tradition. I was going on pilgrimage, I'd heard what the sellers do to a man who can't speak the language, and I decided I wasn't going to be that man. Two years of grammar so I could argue over the price of a prayer mat. Allah had other plans. Somewhere inside that programme the Quran stopped being something I believed and became something I could taste. I wasn't looking for that. I was looking for a better deal. Nineteen years of teaching, and I've never told this story in a class. It's here first, and for now it's only here — about twenty-four minutes, no slides, no notes, just me talking. - 0:00 — My grandfather, who led the dhikr for our whole extended family without a single day of formal study behind him - 1:12 — The years I spent in a Christian couple's home while my parents worked, and the conversations that started there - 6:07 — The aunt who asked why I wasn't at madrasa, and what I did about it on my bicycle - 10:00 — The three years I walked away from all of it - 12:19 — The Arabic programme, and the niyya I'm not proud of If you've ever assumed the people teaching you had it worked out from the beginning — I didn't. This is the honest version. Part two goes up shortly. Now tell me yours. What was your niyya when you started studying, or praying properly, or covering, or whatever the thing was? Not the one you have now. The first one. The unimpressive one.